TechDigs: Mac-friendly RAID 5 setup with Infrant ReadyNAS

One of my ongoing rants on MacBreak Weekly revolves around how hard I've found it to keep up with the spiraling need for responsible personal backup. Photos, movies, audio, documents, you name it. As Mark Pilgrim asked last May, "How do you back up 100 GB of data per year for 50 years?" And don't get me started on media rotation and offsite copies. The mind boggles. I mean, remember when a shoebox full of Zip disks and a copy of Retrospect was all you needed? Good times.

I don't have the long-term solution I'm after just yet (although, I sometimes think Amazon S3 is heading us in the right direction), but for the middle-term, my call for help has been answered handsomely by Greg Keene of TechDigs, who's put together a detailed breakdown on how he wires things together around his Infrant ReadyNAS NV (amzn) -- it's Mac-friendly, Raid 5-able, and has an assload of configurable options.

I have both Mac and Windows computers on my home network that all want/need access to these shared files for different purposes. Most video files are watched in the theater where we have a Media Center PC connected to a DLP projector. The photo files are used by all of the machines on the network for both viewing and editing. At home, most music is listened to over a Sonos music system, and three iPods are synced on Mac and Windows computers. However, when I travel I still want to be able to download podcasts on my MacBook Pro and sync them onto my iPod. The problem became clear with the realization that my life now simply demanded managing hundreds of gigabytes of data. It was time to move to the next level.

Greg goes on to detail how he handles basic setup, automated backups, centralized libraries for iTunes and photos, and more.

This is a great read and has been very useful to me in getting closer to a backup server solution I can live with. Thanks for putting this together, Greg!

[...] Merlin Mann pointed out a great article on TechDigs that addresses a lot of the problems people have with managing their ever increasing volume of media data, and how to back it up. I’ve been thinking about getting a ReadyNAS+ for a while, now I have some better information on how to use it more efficiently. [...]

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